You have a choice. Mindsets are just beliefs. They’re powerful beliefs, but they’re just something in your mind, and you can change your mind. As you read, think about where you’d like to go and which mindset will take you there.
Carol Dweck – Mindset
Mindset: The New Psychology of Success by Carol Dweck is one of my all time favorite books on the psychology of motivation, mindset, and the impact that our words and praise have on other people. The book initially lays out two primary mindsets that people take into their lives, one of fixed talent and one that focuses on the ability to grow. She discusses these mindsets and the impact they can have across all walks of life from business, to teaching, to parenting, or to simply having more self confidence.
I encourage everyone to at least become familiar with the key ideas from this book, there were so many excellent take aways that I had. Here is my quick explanation of the fixed vs. growth mindsets and three of the ideas or case studies that Dweck presents that I found impactful.
Fixed Mindset
The first mindset that Dweck identifies in her research is what she calls the fixed mindset. The fixed mindset is the belief that our qualities and traits are innate and fundamentally unchanging. In the nature vs. nurture debate to why and how humans have developed the way that they have, the fixed mindset falls solidly within the nature category. At its core a fixed mindset values results and talent more than it values effort.
Alright, so what? As Dweck argues:
Believing that your qualities are carved in stone—the fixed mindset—creates an urgency to prove yourself over and over. If you have only a certain amount of intelligence, a certain personality, and a certain moral character—well, then you’d better prove that you have a healthy dose of them. It simply wouldn’t do to look or feel deficient in these most basic characteristics.
A fixed mindset is by its very nature a restrictive mindset. The act of categorizing ones potential and skills into “things I am good at” and “things I am bad at” encourages us to only develop the skills that we are already good out and neglect the skills that we struggle with.
Test Example: “oh, I was just born bad at math”
The thing is you COULD be good at math if you were willing to put in the sincere effort. You may not be good at math now, but you could be in the future. One more example.
Test Example: “I’m not creative enough to draw”
I maintained a fixed mindset in my own life for years, believing that I was good at some things and just naturally bad at others. Those belief’s never helped me grow or improve, rather they encouraged me to only try things that I knew I was good at. If being smart is part of my identity, why risk doing things that would make me feel less than smart?
So what is the alternative?
The Growth Mindset
The growth mindset in contrast argues that we all have potential to develop our skills and abilities with practice and effort. A growth mindset is one that focuses on the potential for where our skills could be rather than where they currently are. At its core, the growth mindset asserts that the most powerful thing that we can do to succeed is to just keep growing and pushing ourselves.
This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts. Although people may differ in every which way—in their initial talents and aptitudes, interests, or temperaments—everyone can change and grow through application and experience.
Skills are developed through regular, consistent usage. As Daniel Coyle in The Talent Code explains, as we activate and use our neural pathways in new and challenging ways our brain builds addition myelin, the insulation around our neurons that improves their function and speed. The Talent Code came out several decades after Dweck’s book Mindset, however the more modern science integrates directly into the growth mindset that this book focuses upon.
In one world, effort is a bad thing. It, like failure, means you’re not smart or talented. If you were, you wouldn’t need effort. In the other world, effort is what makes you smart or talented
A growth mindset though isn’t simply the door to opening up better performance, it is a mindset that empowers self confidence, combats anxiety, and most importantly, provides hope.
So What? On How Not to Offer Praise
Carol Dweck currently holds the Lewis and Virginia Eaton Professorship of Psychology at Stanford University where she has spent decades conducting research, primarily on the motivation of children. Her findings are honestly stunning.
In one of her seminal studies her team gave hundreds of students a fairly difficult set of ten problems from a nonverbal IQ test. Once the children finished the test the team praised some of the students for their ability “wow, you got 8 right, you must be really smart at this” and others for their effort “wow you got 8 right, you must have worked really hard at this”. Both groups were initially equal in their performance and scores but after the praise was awarded something began to change.
After awarding praise they asked the students if they wanted to continue and try a new challenging task that they could learn from. The fixed mindset students who were praised for ability rejected the more challenging tasks at far higher rates than their effort praised growth mindset counterparts. The fixed mindset students also reported significantly lower enjoyment of the more challenging problems after the fact and most strikingly, when asked to write about their results and experience to share with similar students in other schools almost 40% of the students praised for their ability lied about their scores in their letters.
If success had meant they were intelligent, then less-than-success meant they were deficient
The simple act of praising intelligence instead of ability resulted in a lower interest in the academic activity, lower levels of performance, and a staggeringly high percentage of those children lied about their own performance.
The words and praise that we give to children plays a huge role in their motivation and enjoyment of the tasks that they complete. As Dweck says:
Parents think they can hand children permanent confidence—like a gift—by praising their brains and talent. It doesn’t work, and in fact has the opposite effect. It makes children doubt themselves as soon as anything is hard or anything goes wrong. If parents want to give their children a gift, the best thing they can do is to teach their children to love challenges, be intrigued by mistakes, enjoy effort, and keep on learning.
A Growth Mindset Creates Self Confidence
The component of the growth mindset that is most compelling to me is how freeing it can feel. If you have spent your life believing that some things are outside of your abilities, that some skills are simply meant for other, better people, than a growth mindset can set you free. Dweck shares case study after case study where they worked with students who were coming from disadvantaged areas and who through effort, excellent teaching, and a constant growth mindset were able to find success.
I want to share the story that Dweck shares of a young low effort kid who went through workshops on how the brain works and the impact of a growth mindset and the impact it had on his mindset.
One day, we were introducing the growth mindset to a new group of students. All at once Jimmy—the most hard-core turned-off low-effort kid in the group—looked up with tears in his eyes and said, “You mean I don’t have to be dumb?’
Even if you are unconvinced by the numerous studies that Dweck and others like her have completed, you are unconvinced that simply believing you can improve actually leads to improvement or you simply don’t want to change. Jimmy shows us the power that giving a child hope can have. After the study they followed up on Jimmy’s performance and found that he maintained the attitude that effort could make him smarter and his grades, engagement and performance continued to be much higher than they were when he thought he was destined to be dumb.
Your Mindset Changes Your Mind
One of the most insidious impacts that a fixed mindset provides is that it warps the very way that our brains interpret the questions and feedback that they receive. Dweck’s team brought individuals who were identified under both mindsets to their brain-wave lab at Columbia. They were given hard questions to answer and received feedback while their brain waves were observed. Here are the results:
The fixed mindset group’s brain activity shows that they were only interested when the feedback when the feedback was about their ability. The brain waves showed that they were laser focused on being told if they got a question right or wrong, but that once they learned they got the answer wrong, they suddenly lost interest in learning what the right answer was. The growth mindset group? Their brain waves continued to reflect interest throughout the feedback.
So what does this mean? If you go into a situation with a fixed, ability centered mindset your brain will naturally ignore the feedback or details that are not directly about your performance. You will miss the feedback on how to grow, improve and become better. Sure, we all get problems wrong sometimes, but growth only happens when we acknowledge our errors and learn how to correct them for the future. A fixed mindset quite literally can shut off our brains ability to accept feedback.
Conclusion
Mindset by Carol Dweck was an excellent read. I pulled out a few of my personal favorite studies and facts, but ultimately this book has something different for everyone. If you are a manager looking for advice on coaching employees, a teacher trying to get better at your craft, or the parent desperately trying their best, Mindset has something clear to offer you.
